As part of his ongoing mission to pretend the bad stuff isn't happening, Stephen Harper has banned the media from filming the coffins of fallen Canadian soldiers or, indeed, being anywhere near them.
From the CBC, although Metro called it first, and with perfect accuracy, on this very website several days ago. Please note that these pictures are several years old, from the Canadian deaths in Afghanistan resulting from the American bombing.
Reporters were not allowed into the military airbase at Trenton, Ont., to cover the Tuesday evening arrival of the remains of four soldiers who died in a weekend bombing.
Harper said the policy has been implemented to respect the privacy of the families.
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"It should be up to the families to decide whether they want reporters present at such ceremonies," said Richard Leger, whose son Marc was killed in Afghanistan four years ago.
"I know, in 2002, it was a great thing for us to have the media there… We wanted to show all Canadians what the cost of their liberty is," he told CBC Newsworld.
"People saying, 'Thank you for the life of Marc' – as a parent that's hard to hear, but knowing what's the reason behind it helps us to move on."
Maureen Burrowes, who is a cousin of Payne, said the government is depriving her of her chance to be part of Tuesday night's ceremony.
"I honestly believed I would see my cousin's return on CBC as I could not be present today," she wrote in an e-mail. "I really feel that our current government has made a very bad decision and voters will remember this in the next election."
"The timing is absolutely horrendous and I would love to know how to get this reversed."
From Sploid. You know it's a slow news day when you've checked Fark, Guido Fawkes, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, the Province, BoingBoing, News of the Weird and the ever-reliable Weekly World News and you only find one story worth posting.
Most people who visit England's historic Stonehenge monument come away disappointed.
In photographs, the ancient whatever-it-is looks impressive with the sun shining through its stone gates and the majestic silence and all that.
But in reality, the sun never shines at all because that's how England is, and there's a huge freeway right next to the monument so all you hear is traffic, and the whole place is overrun with dirty hippies wearing hooded druid robes.
Luckily, there's a much better option.
This is recycling at its most creative. Truly, the artist should be very, very proud, if for no other reason than it keeps those loopy neo-Druids out of my way. Adam Horowitz is reported to be the artist. Hmmm, isn't he in Beastie Boys? O! How the mighty have fallen!
Today, as you may have noticed, was Politics Day at the ol' raincoaster blog. And, surprisingly, I find that the only thing which out-pulls sex and/or curling (curling porn was a top search, btw) is politics. Glad I found something that did. Getting a wee bit tired of the eedjuts coming to this blog via searches for "Mango Porn."
I am indeed a famewhore of the highest order (the lower orders have to sit on the unshaded side of the temple and stick to beige robes) but even I am not gonna be rooting for more dead Canadian soldiers or pissy, self-serving and moronic Tory policies from the remarkably lifelike Stephen Harper or the remarkably simian George W. Bush. Although I do admit a peculiar fondness for the video of that funny little Chaplin impersonator and that funny Turko-American writer fellow.
No, seriously. Thanks to my beloved paranoiacs at Cryptome I’ve found a CIA program I can actually support. Cheer. Rip off, even. And I encourage you and everyone you know to do the same.
George C. Minden, who for 37 years ran a secret American program that put 10 million Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, died on April 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
Mr. Minden was president of the International Literary Center, an organization financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, which tried to win influential friends by giving them reading material unavailable in their own countries. The material ranged from dictionaries, medical texts and novels by Joyce and Nabokov to art museum catalogs and Parisian fashion magazines.
The people who received the reading matter were generally Communists or professionals and intellectuals working for Communist regimes. They thought the books were being donated by Western publishers and cultural organizations.
The C.I.A.’s purpose was to offer an alternative, culturally engaging reality that had the implicit effect of promoting Western culture. Mr. Minden did not see a need to bluntly refute Marxist dogma, on the theory that people could use common sense and their own observations to reject Communist arguments.
The project became something of a personalized book club; files were kept on recipients’ reading tastes, so as to better satisfy them in the future.
Hmmmm, I always wondered about the forehead from which Amazon sprang, fully-formed…now we know.
Mr. Minden wrote in an internal memo that the West‘s main obstacle was “not Marxist obstacles, but a vacuum,” and that “what is needed is something against frustration and stultification, against a life full of omissions.”
Proselytizing for freedom of choice and independence of thought sounds like a pretty noble set of goals for the CIA, and they deserve a big hand for undertaking this project. Let’s keep the dream alive by doing this on our own, shall we? You know that’s what Minden would have wanted.
Suggested targets of this consciousness-raising guerrilla intelligence action include: Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Indonesia, the Sudan, Uganda, and the United States of America.
raincoaster 